Tag Archives: UITextField

Keyboards in iOS can have various sizes. Not only can a keyboard be presented in portrait or landscape, on various devices with a plethora of screen sizes, and users may have QuickType enabled or disabled. Too many variables for hard coding.

Lucky for us, we can check all kinds of properties about a keyboard by dissecting the dictionary that is passed with the notifications mentioned in my previous post. If you recall, we can check when a keyboard appears or disappears using an observer. Let’s take a look at that notification when the keyboard is presented, and we can extract the height like this:

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To detect when the keyboard from a UITextField is being brought up (and goes away again), the UITextField Delegate Protocol won’t help us. Instead we need to listen to two notifications, namely UIKeyBoardWillShow and UIKeyboardWillHide.

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In this screencast I’ll show you how to dismiss the iOS Keyboard, which is commonly brought up by a UITextField – but doesn’t want to leave easy once summoned.

It’s easy to overlook a step in this procedure, so I thought a screencast is in order. We’re discussing two dismissal options here:

when the DONE button is pressed

and when users tap outside the textfield

The latter option isn’t built into iOS, but users have come to rely on this behaviour. I’m using Xcode 5.1.1 and iOS 7.1 in this demo.

Happy hacking!

Steps in a nutshell

The trick is to implement a delegate method from the UITextField Protocol named textFieldShouldReturn. In it we need to tell the text field to resign its first responder status, giving up its “focus” so to speak.

To make the keyboard go away when someone taps outside of it, drag out a huge button over the area that is not covered by the keyboard. Hook it up to a method and simply call the textFieldShouldReturn method to it. Even as of iOS 11, that’s the only way to make it work.

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It has puzzled many generations how to get rid of the keyboard when the user is done entering text into an iOS text field. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious action we can attach to make this happen.

That’s because rather than looking at the keyboard itself, we need to look at what actually brought it up in the first place: the UITextField. Even though the text field can trigger an action, we don’t want to touch that for dismissing the keyboard. All we need to do is to implement the following method from its delegate protocol: